What, President Barack Obama would like to know, could Republicans have against an older, moderate white man who chokes up talking about marrying his wife.

The White House finished the day Wednesday feeling pretty good about Day One of the long Supreme Court fight ahead, able to point to support from major institutional players from both parties, a rush of largely positive coverage about Merrick Garland and most importantly, a series of cracks in what was before the official nomination an almost completely solid wall of Republican Senate opposition.

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Part of that was about Garland himself. Part of that was about the Supreme Court fight now shifting out of the abstract, and into a very real, very human battle with clear politics and optics.

From the hours after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died last month, people close to the White House have seen the looming Senate confirmation battle as a simple question of whether it's about Obama or about the nominee. The more it's about the nominee, they figured, the better their chances are.

Over the past four weeks, Obama’s allies have pushed and pulled him, with some lobbying for a pick that would go more overtly base-stirring, such as Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who would inject a dynamite element into the presidential and Senate elections as Republicans refusing to meet with an African-American woman.

As Lynch pulled herself out of the running, Sri Srinivasan became the widely expected pick, being a man who is not just of Indian descent, but an Indian immigrant who’s a practicing Hindu and was sworn into his current D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals job on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

In the end, Obama selected Garland, a 63-year-old federal appeals court judge with a personal rapport and a history of breaking with his liberal counterparts.

People close to the White House’s discussions saw Obama making the political calculation that Garland was the one potential nominee with so many professional and personal qualifications — and so few potential knocks against him — that any opposition to him will be clearly seen as pure obstructionist Republican politics.

He may not have what people believed to have been Obama's perfect choice. But he's who the president and his aides have determined is their best shot — Mr. Right Now, if not the dreamy Mr. Right (or in this case, Mr. Left).

Obama pressed that point on Wednesday, calling Garland “uniquely prepared to serve immediately.”

The fight began instantly, with Garland making phone calls to senators as soon as he walked back out of the Rose Garden with Obama. Thursday, he heads to the Hill for the first of his meetings with senators — he'll see Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Patrick Leahy — that will kick off an intense media and political strategy all about pressuring Senate Republicans to crack.

Senators then head home for a two-week recess, which Obama said he was hoping they’ll use to reflect on the right thing to do, but which is really about the president and his aides hoping that Republicans are hit so hard back home that they return to Washington having felt the pain.

The organizing was already visible among those in the seats in the Rose Garden, including the captains of outside allies’ effort to promote Garland’s nomination, Stephanie Cutter, and former White House legislative affairs director Katie Beirne Fallon, who’s helping with congressional outreach, Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, Democratic National Committee vice chair Donna Brazile, labor leaders Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO and Lee Saunders of AFSCME and a full slate of Senate Democrats.

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, was spotted by POLITICO headed into the West Wing immediately after the announcement ended, and later issued a cautiously positive statement about Garland. "Judge Garland seems like a responsible and qualified nominee. There’s a lot that we don’t know about his judicial approach, and that’s why the Senate needs to do its job and hold a fair hearing and up or down vote," she said. "The President has done his constitutional duty, and now it’s time for the Senate to do theirs."

Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) told POLITICO that his members started studying Garland’s record as soon as word of the selection went out — but he said that as he was leaving the Rose Garden, having already applauded the choice.

At least according to actuarial tables, Garland, who’s a decade older than the average for other recent nominees, is likely to have less time on the court than his predecessors. He has more-than-average experience with law and order and terrorism, as an assistant United States attorney and a chief investigator in the Oklahoma City bombing case. He’s got a compelling biography as a grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants who, Obama noted, needed to sell his comic book collection to pay for law school, and who’s earned the previous praise of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Chief Justice John Roberts, whose laudatory quotes the president clearly took pleasure reading to the cameras in his nominating speech.

Hatch, notably, told Newsmax just last week that Obama “could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man," before sniping, "he probably won’t do that because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the liberal Democratic base wants.”

“To find someone who just about everyone not only respects but genuinely likes, that is rare, and it speaks to who Merrick Garland is not just as a lawyer but as a man,” Obama said, capping off a month-long selection process that included interviews with several candidates over the last week.

Then Obama turned it to the Senate Republicans, whom he pointed out are out of step with two-thirds of Americans in their promise not to move on the nominee.

“I said I would take this process seriously, and I did,” Obama said, urging Republicans not to fully dunk the Supreme Court process into politics, particularly because it’s a divisive, volatile election year in every other regard.

"I hope they're fair,” Obama said, voicing a thought likely to be echoed many times by the White House and their allies, and which their own polls show resonates strongly with independents. “That's all. I hope they are fair."

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, facing a tough reelection fight, said on Wednesday that she still opposes moving on a nomination ahead of the presidential race, but would take the time to explain her position to Garland. Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said he would also meet with Garland. And Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, added that she'd take a meeting with Garland and urged the Judiciary Committee to follow regular order by holding a hearing.

Even Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, was expected to talk with Garland on the phone on Wednesday, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had his own call on Wednesday afternoon.

And Garland, his voice shaking and broken throughout his brief remarks, made it about his work and the people he’s served.

“Fidelity to the Constitution and the law has been the cornerstone of my professional life, and it’s the hallmark of the kind of judge I have tried to be for the past 18 years,” Garland said. “If the Senate sees fit to confirm me to the position for which I have been nominated today, I promise to continue on that course.”

McConnell firmly re-upped his commitment to blocking Obama’s nominee, and Republicans weren’t the only ones objecting to the choice. As word of Garland’s selection spread, the left-wing group Democracy for America issued a statement complaining that Obama hadn’t picked a woman or a person of color, insisting that this would make the confirmation that they support harder.

With the lines now drawn, everyone anywhere near the president’s side will be pressed to get in line, enthusiastically.

"The notion that Senate Republicans, many of whom walk around with the constitution in their pockets, would shirk their constitutional responsibility and ignore the will of the voters who reelected President Obama overwhelmingly in 2012 is an abomination that is at odds with the views of the vast majority of the American people,” said Brad Woodhouse, the president of Americans United for Change, which is managing the Obama campaign veterans already on the ground working to amp up pressure in the most vulnerable incumbents’ states and Grassley’s Iowa.

The White House’s Senate math comes down to a campaign for 14 Republicans to join Democrats to break an expected filibuster, and at least five Republicans to give the majority to confirm Garland. For weeks, they’ve broken down their odds into institutionalists (like Lamar Alexander and Flake), moderates (like Collins) and vulnerable incumbents up for re-election this year (Ayotte, Ron Johnson, Mark Kirk, Pat Toomey and Rob Portman).

Theoretically, there are enough Republicans who fit those categories to give Garland the votes he’d need. Realistically, any movement, even to a hearing, would require an amazing backing down from McConnell and Grassley, who are categorically opposed to Obama getting to make the pick and have gotten all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to sign a letter holding to that.

McConnell and Grassley didn’t even vote for Garland when he was overwhelmingly confirmed in 1997 to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. On Wednesday, as soon as Garland was announced, McConnell clearly dug in on his promise.

And Democratic operatives dug in on their response: the Democratic-supportive Senate Majority PAC put out word that of an expanded digital ad buy for their television ad last circulated last week charging that Ayotte wants Trump, the Republican frontrunner, to fill the Supreme Court seat.

No Democrat on the Hill or in the White House is optimistic that Garland will be confirmed.

Asked in the Rose Garden what he’d say to those that argue Garland is just being put up as a sacrificial lamb, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough smiled and said only, “I’m associating myself with the remarks of the president.”

But they are optimistic that they can at least win the political fight.

On a call with reporters after the announcement, White House principal deputy press secretary Eric Schultz shot down the idea that the opposition to Obama’s getting to make the pick was about the principle of not doing this in an election year, as McConnell has repeated.

Schultz said that’s belied by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus saying he’ll launch a campaign against the president’s nominee, and Johnson—one of the endangered Republican incumbents—saying in an interview that Republicans would have filled this vacancy at this point in the cycle if Mitt Romney had won the 2012 election.

“Leader McConnell is absolutely entitled to his view, but if you look at whether that’s backed up by principle or by politics,” Schultz said, “I think we now have that answer.”